Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, February 16, 2009

UNRWA stands by its story

In the wake of the IDF report that only 12 were killed outside the Jabalya UNRWA school in Gaza, I asked UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness:

As I am sure you have seen by now, the IDF is claiming that there were 12 killed by shells outside the Jabalya UNRWA school on January 6, not the 30-40 that have been claimed by others. (See http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304788684&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull.) The IDF is also saying that only three of the victims were civilians.

I seem to recall the UN or UNRWA saying that some 30 were killed immediately and another 10-15 died overnight from their injuries.

Does UNRWA have a list of the dead from that incident, along with their ages? If not, where did UNRWA get their numbers from - was it from local doctors, or the media, or some other source? (The PCHR mentioned 27 killed initially but did not list the names, as they usually do.)

In other words, can UNRWA show that the IDF is wrong in its account of the incident, and if so, how?

He replied, in his usual terse manner:

Let it all come out in an independent investigation. C

I persisted:

John Ging said at the time that there were 30 dead and 55 injured.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUKN06430746

Does UNRWA still stand behind that statement or are you saying now that it is unclear? And are you saying that UNRWA does not have a list of victims from the incident? Where exactly did Ging get his numbers from?

And Chris replied:

We stand by the figures and our call for an impartial investigation to see if there have been violations of int humanitarian law. C

Meanwhile, I found John Ging's email address and asked him similar questions; we'll see if he replies.

Ben-Yehuda in the comments noticed that the Kadima website was been hacked.

It does appear to have been done by hackers in Gaza, as the domain name (gaza-hacker.com) is registered in Gaza itself.

Registrant:
Mr. Mohammed AbuYousef
Palestine - Gaza
Gaza, PS 00972
IL

Registrar: DOTREGISTRAR
Domain Name: GAZA-HACKER.COM
Created on: 08-MAR-07
Expires on: 08-MAR-12
Last Updated on: 06-FEB-09

Administrative, Technical Contact:
AbuYousef, Mr. Mohammed Master@Mohammed.ps
Palestine - Gaza
Gaza, PS 00972
IL
00972599901972

Mohammed.ps is a malformed page dedicated to the "prophet" Mohammed himself.

The hacked page itself has some stupid pictures of burning Israeli flags and the like; it is playing what sounds like a PalArab national anthem; pretty boring stuff.

The gaza-hacker.com site itself is hosted by a US site called liquidweb.com. If you are so inclined you might want to complain to them:

OrgName: Liquid Web, Inc.
OrgID: LQWB
Address: 4210 Creyts Rd.
City: Lansing
StateProv: MI
PostalCode: 48917
Country: US

ReferralServer: rwhois://rwhois.liquidweb.com:4321/

NetRange: 72.52.128.0 - 72.52.255.255
CIDR: 72.52.128.0/17
NetName: LIQUIDWEB-6
NetHandle: NET-72-52-128-0-1
Parent: NET-72-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS.LIQUIDWEB.COM
NameServer: NS1.LIQUIDWEB.COM
Comment:
RegDate: 2006-08-03
Updated: 2007-03-26

OrgAbuseHandle: ABUSE551-ARIN
OrgAbuseName: Abuse
OrgAbusePhone: +1-800-580-4985
OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@liquidweb.com

OrgTechHandle: IPADM47-ARIN
OrgTechName: IP Administrator
OrgTechPhone: +1-800-580-4985
OrgTechEmail: ipadmin@liquidweb.com

The most effective way to get rid of the cyber-arsonists is to complain to their hosts, and from their web page it appears that they have been kicked off of previous hosts as well. A polite email to abuse@liquidnet.com or webmaster@liquidnet.com should be enough.

UPDATE: That was not the official Kadima site. The real site is here. (h/t lol)

Priceless Holzberg photos, videos restored

In Judaism there is a concept of "chesed shel emet," of a true kindness that can never be repaid. It is usually said with regard to taking care of the needs of the departed, as the recipients of the kindness can never return the favor.

Here is a beautiful example.

During the massacre in the Mumbai Chabad House, the murderers not only shot the Holzbergs multiple times, but they also shot their computer.

An Israeli company has spent many hours recovering the contents of the damaged hard disk, and have now restored thousands of photos and videos of the Holzberg family - priceless memories that can now be seen by the grandparents as well as little Moishe.

Here is an Israeli TV report about this huge mitzvah. It's in Hebrew, but easy to understand even if you don't know the language, and you can also see clips of the Holzbergs that would have been lost forever, as well as the reaction of the grandparents upon seeing these photos for the first time:

Holtzberg's Computer Restored from COLlive.com on Vimeo.

(h/t Atlas)

Work accident! (correction)

From Ma'an:

A Palestinian was killed on Monday morning and four others were injured in a mysterious explosion in the northern Gaza Strip, medical sources reported. One Palestinian, identified as Rajab Usama Subuh, 25, was killed in the blast, while two of four others injured in Beit Lahiya were in critical condition just before noon on Monday.

Earlier, Gazans had claimed this came from an Israeli artillery shell, but the IDF denied any activities in the area. The PalArab self-death count in 2009 is now at 29. UPDATE: This was not a work accident, just an apparent case of stupidity:

Palestinian hospital officials say a 25-year-old Gaza man has been killed and five people have been wounded in a blast along the border with Israel.
Palestinian security officials say the explosion in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya was caused when people who were melting down scrap metal for recycling inadvertently threw an explosive device into the fire.

This no longer falls into my definition of self-death (although, as Richard from Augean Stables points out in the comments, it is a Darwin Award candidate,) so we are back down to 28, unless more information comes out.

(h/t PTWatch)

Two degrees of separation, carnival edition

I was linked to in Soccer Dad's weekly Shiny Happy Dhimmi #13. Soccer Dad and I are two degrees separated from each other by both of us knowing Elie.

I am also included in the two hundred somethingth edition of Haveil Havalim, this week hosted by Leora of Here in Highland Park. There is very little doubt that she and I know at least a few people in common, making us also two degrees separated.

And I recently found out that I am also two degrees separated from Jameel at The Muqata, through his brother. Whether I can parlay that into waffles remains to be seen.

PalArab news roundup 2-15-09

A 46 year old Palestinian Arab woman was shot and killed in Gaza, as terrorists were training in the former Jewish settlement of Nitzarim and a stray bullet hit her in the chest.

A man who was abducted by Hamas in early January died from his injuries last week.

Hamas claims that they have body parts of an Israeli soldier. Interestingly, this sounds like the same fake soldier that Hamas claimed to have abducted and kept for two days, yet they cannot produce his name or any identifiable information about him.

What do the settlements and Gilad Shalit have in common? They are both considered "obstacles to peace!" According to the DFLP, Israel's insistence on the release of Shalit is making a truce so much harder, and of course (as with the settlements) it is Israel's fault that there is no peace.

The rumors of an imminent agreement, including the release of Gilad Shalit and Marwan Barghouti, have been going on for weeks now; they seem to be accelerating. I haven't been talking about it much because it is still pure rumor, but just letting you know that the stories have been coming out every day about breakthroughs in negotiations. Similarly, there are also stories about negotiations on the verge of collapse.

Muslim leaders continue their daily accusations of Israeli attempts to destroy Al Aqsa. Today they claim to have seen cracks in the ceiling, and they are blaming Israeli excavations that they are convinced are going on beneath the Temple Mount.

A programming glitch seems to have caused a number of SMS messages to be sent to Jordanian cell phone users saying, in English and Arabic, "Welcome to Israel. We wish you a pleasant stay. We hope you enjoy the roaming services we provide." I'm sure that someone will use this as proof that Israel is planning to attack Jordan.

The 2009 PalArab self-death count rises to 28.

The UNRWA school story was a lie

The Jerusalem Post has seen the (still incomplete) IDF list of people killed in Gaza, and the story that Hamas (as well as the Palestinian Health Ministry, UNRWA and PCHR) have been telling the media are absolute lies:

While the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose death toll figures have been widely cited, reports that 895 Gaza civilians were killed in the fighting, amounting to more than two-thirds of all fatalities, the IDF figures shown to the Post on Sunday put the civilian death toll at no higher than a third of the total.

The international community had been given a vastly distorted impression of the death toll because of "false reporting" by Hamas, said Col. Moshe Levi, the head of the IDF's Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA), which compiled the IDF figures.

As an example of such distortion, he cited the incident near a UN school in Jabalya on January 6, in which initial Palestinian reports falsely claimed IDF shells had hit the school and killed 40 or more people, many of them civilians.

In fact, he said, 12 Palestinians were killed in the incident - nine Hamas operatives and three noncombatants. Furthermore, as had since been acknowledged by the UN, the IDF was returning fire after coming under attack, and its shells did not hit the school compound.

"From the beginning, Hamas claimed that 42 people were killed, but we could see from our surveillance that only a few stretchers were brought in to evacuate people," said Levi, adding that the CLA contacted the PA Health Ministry and asked for the names of the dead. "We were told that Hamas was hiding the number of dead."

This is so amazing that I decided to go back to the PCHR website and see exactly what they reported that day from the UNRWA school, since they typically give the names of the dead:

At approximately 15:35, IOF tanks fired 4 shells at Jabalya refugee camp. On the shells hit a house belonging to Samir Shafeeq Deeb, 43, Killing him and his mother, Shamma Salem Deeb, 70; three of his children: 'Essam, 12, Mohammad, 23, and Fatima, 20; five of his brother's children: Nour, 2, Mustafa, 12, Mohammad, 17, Aseel, 7, and Alaa', 19; and his brother's wife, Amal Matar Deeb, 34. The other three shells hit al-Fakhoura School which was sheltering approximately dozens of families who fled their homes in Beit Lahia, Killing 27 civilians instantly, including 8 children, 2 brothers ans a man and his son, and wounding at least 50 civilians. IOF claimed that the school was used by Hamas to launch attacks on Israel. UNRWA sources and eyewitnesses completely refuted this claim. However, the justification used by IOF implies they deliberately targeted the civilians inside the school, which constitutes a war crime under international law.

While PCHR is most willing to list the names of the Deeb family - which did appear (as far as I know) to have been a tragic accident - notice that they simply say that 27 were killed at the school, without listing names, and that the shells hit the school (which we know is not true.)

The entire episode as originally reported was a lie: Israel didn't hit the school, 40+ civilians didn't die (as I mentioned that the time, that is a huge death count for tank shells), and most of the death were in fact terrorists.

The JPost article continues:

Basing its work on the official Palestinian death toll of 1,338, Levi said the CLA had now identified more than 1,200 of the Palestinian fatalities. Its 200-page report lists their names, their official Palestinian Authority identity numbers, the circumstances in which they were killed and, where appropriate, the terrorist group with which they were affiliated.

The CLA said 580 of these 1,200 had been conclusively "incriminated" as members of Hamas and other terrorist groups.

Another 300 of the 1,200 - women, children aged 15 and younger and men over the age of 65 - had been categorized as noncombatants, the CLA said.

Counted among the women, however, were female terrorists, including at least two women who tried to blow themselves up next to forces from the Givati and Paratroopers' Brigades. Also classed as noncombatants were the wives and children of Nizar Rayyan, a Hamas military commander who refused to allow his family to leave his home even after he was warned by Israel that it would be bombed.

The 320 names yet to be classified are all men; the IDF has yet complete its identification work in these cases, but estimates that two-thirds of them were terror operatives.

The CLA gave the Post the names of several fatalities who it said had been classified by the Palestinians as "medics," but who it stated were Hamas fighters, including Anas Naim, the nephew of Hamas Health Minister Bassem Naim, who was killed during clashes with the IDF on January 4 in the Sheikh Ajlin neighborhood of Gaza City.

Following the clashes, the Palestinian press reported that Naim was killed and that he was a medic with the Palestinian Red Crescent. The Gaza CLA, however, produced photographs of Naim posing holding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and a Kalashnikov assault rifle that had been posted on a Hamas Web site.

...As a consequence of the false information, the IDF was considering setting up a "response team" for future conflicts whose job would be to collect information, analyze it and issue reports as rapidly as possible that refuted Hamas fabrications.

CLA head Col. Moshe Levi acknowledged on Sunday that all this information - on both such specific incidents as the UN school and the overall classifications of the dead - would probably be largely ignored today, since it was being made available so long after the fighting ended. But Levi explained that the IDF was not prepared to issue information unless and until it was confident of its accuracy, no matter how grievous the damage to Israel's image, and the consequent political pressures caused by the delays in contesting inaccurate facts and figures.

Unbelievable. This report is coming out four weeks too late but at least it is coming out. Reporters should have been skeptical from the start about the Gaza "atrocity" stories given the Palestinian Arab penchant for lying.

I hope that the IDF starts showing this report to other journalists.

Iranian companies call rivals "Zionist"

From The National (UAE):

Allegations in Iran against Nestlé, the international food company, of having affiliations with Israel may have been spread by rivals of the company, a conservative Iranian news portal has reported.

The report titled “Iran’s Nestlé in Rivals’ Trap” appeared on Tabnak, which is affiliated with an influential conservative politician, Mohsen Rezaiee, secretary of the Expediency Council and a former chief commander of the Revolutionary Guards.
The report by Tabnak said the allegations against Nestlé were made and spread by rival companies and importers of infant food.

The report also found a Nestlé factory in Qazvin, 200km west of Tehran, had to halt its operations after demonstrators demanded its closing following the military offensive in Gaza, but begun operating again after intervention from the state inspection organisation.
The General Inspection Organisation has cleared the company of charges of Zionism for the time being. In Iran, any person or organization charged with Zionist affiliations or sympathies is considered a possible threat to national security.

And demonstrations against western companies with alleged affiliations to Israel, such as Nestlé, Benetton and Coca-Cola, are frequent in Iran whenever anti-Israeli feelings run high. A Benetton shop in an affluent northern Tehran neighbourhood was set on fire by radicals in the early days of the offensive in Gaza. Other Benetton outlets had to close for a few days until the situation cooled down; they are now all operating normally.

A while back I coined the term "misoziony" to describe the utterly irrational hatred of all things Zionist, and Iran is Exhibit A.

A few well-placed rumors can affect the Iranian economy, thanks to the gullibility of its people and the unreal hatred they have towards "Zionism."

So in order to stop Iran's march to create nuclear weapons, I think it is time to publicize all of the Zionists (really, Jews, but close enough) who worked on The Manhattan Project, and whose innovations must be strictly haram for the misozionistic mullahs:

Robert Oppenheimer
Richard P. Feynman
Wolfgang Pauli
Leo Szilard
Albert Einstein
John von Neumann
Isidor I. Rabi
Edward Teller
Eugene Wigner
Otto Frisch
Samuel Goudsmit
Jerome Karle
Stanisław Ulam
Robert Serber
Louis Slotin
Walter Zinn
Robert Marshak
Felix Bloch
Emilio G. Segrè
James Franck
Joseph Joffe
Eugene Rabinowitch
Hy Goldsmith
Samuel Cohen
Victor F. Weisskopf
David Bohm
Hans Bethe
Niels Bohr

It appears to me that the atom bomb is really a Zionist invention, and Iran would be hypocritical to want to use that technology, rather than developing its own Islamically pure alternative.

AP wakes up about Hamas murder spree

AP mentions:

International and Palestinian human rights organizations say there was a rash of shootings and beatings across Gaza during Israel's offensive, voicing suspicions the Islamic militants of Hamas used wartime chaos to target enemies, including activists from the rival Fatah.
Two Gaza-based groups, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the Independent Commission on Human Rights, interviewed survivors and witnesses who said some attacks were carried out by members of Hamas' internal security service.

Amnesty International went further, saying Hamas militiamen engaged in a "campaign of abductions, deliberate and unlawful killings, torture and death threats against those they accuse of 'collaborating' with Israel, as well as opponents and critics."

This is all very nice, but a bit outdated. The ICHR report came out January 26, PCHR report came out February 3, and Amnesty's on February 10. Not only that, but AP quotes the PCHR report of 32 killed, without mentioning that others have been murdered by Hamas afterwards.

This might have been a decent report had it been printed a couple of weeks ago. Now that the world has lost interest in Gaza is not the time to start to notice Hamas crimes that were ignored - but reported on - during the operation.

(h/t Soccer Dad for the link - I never get to see MSM stuff anymore as I spend my time scouring the Arab media; it drives me nuts that a part time blogger consistently finds and reports on things weeks before the thousands of members of the MSM, if they even report it at all.)

Another intransigent, extremist Arab country

Similar to the example I gave today from Yemen, Bahrain is another country whose attitudes towards Israel would be considered "extremist" and "intransigent" if Israel applied the same attitudes towards any Arab country. But instead, it is regarded as "moderate" and "friendly."

From NewsBlaze:

The Bahrain government has denied accusations by non-governmental organisations that it was moving towards normalising ties with Israel.
The government has faced sharp criticism from NGOs and human rights group since the Israeli air raids in the Gaza Strip this year. The word on the street is since the tiny island is a close US ally; the authorities would not consider opening the Israeli boycott office which was shut down in 2006.

But the government maintained its stance and said there was no need for the office to be reopened as it said laws and regulations forbid public organisations from violating ban on Israeli goods. This was stated in a letter responding to a bill in parliament which called for Anti Normalisation with the Zionists and reopening the office.

Bahrain has no ties with Israeli and has always reacted sharply from calling off Israeli goods in supermarkets to launching a petition calling for reopening the Israeli boycott office.

The Bahrain Society against Normalisation with the Zionist Enemy has collected over 200 hundred signatures to re-open the office.

Abdulla Malik, general secretary of the society said, "The office was set up in 1963 in Bahrain. It was closed after Bahrain signed the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the US in 2004. We want the office to be re-opened to ban Israeli goods, as by closing it we are sending signs of diplomatic ties with killers."

The Bahrain Minister of Foreign Affairs, Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa told Pan- Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat in an interview that US never asked them to normalise relations with Israel.

Perhaps, but the US did say that the Bahrain boycott of Israel was illegal under the US-Bahrain Free Trade Agreement:

Separate from the FTA obligations, Bahrain confirmed in a letter that it did not apply the “secondary” and “tertiary” boycotts against Israel and stated that it recognized the need to terminate the “primary” boycott of Israel imposed by the Arab League states in 1963. The “primary” boycott prohibits direct trade between Israel and the Arab nations. It is not clear whether this statement is legally binding, though the USTR has claimed that it is binding. The commitment is not enforceable under the Agreement. The “secondary” boycott blacklists companies that do business in Israel, while the “tertiary” boycott applies to companies that have relationships with companies that operate in Israel. Bahrain theoretically has not enforced the “secondary” and “tertiary” boycotts on Israel since 1994, though periodically, Bahraini government documents contain language related to these boycotts.

The boycott decision has been controversial in Bahrain and has led to a strong backlash against the Bahrain FTA – the lower chamber of Bahrain’s Parliament (the House of Deputies) voted overwhelmingly to oppose lifting the boycott. However, this vote was largely symbolic as the Government of Bahrain stands by its statement that it intends to lift the boycott.

The Administration agreed in the Statement of Administrative Action for the Bahrain Act to report on Bahrain’s progress in dismantling its boycott of Israel.

Since the US and Bahrain concluded the agreement, trade between the two countries has increased by over 50% . Perhaps it is time for the US to revisit how well Bahrain is sticking to its side of the bargain?

Arab lie of the day

From the Tripoli Post:

Isaac Herzog, a member of the ‘Israeli’ cabinet was interviewed last week on ‘Hardtalk’, ‎a BBC World Service programme. ‎
‎ ‎
Without a hint of shame, Herzog tried to defend Israel’s war crimes claiming that ‘Israel’ ‎suffered 5000 ‘rockets’ over the years of the blockade of Gaza from Hamas. What a lie!‎
‎ ‎
The ‘anger missiles’ sent by Gazans remind me of the ‘missiles’ launched at times by ‎demonstrators against riot police in democratic Europe. I laugh when I see the ‎destruction those so called ‘rockets’ cause. ‎
‎ ‎
These rockets mostly fall on empty spaces creating a ‘ditch’ five inches wide and two ‎inches deep obviously caused by impact rather than the explosives charge in them. ‎
‎ ‎
The collective and total explosive power of all those 5000 so-called ‘rockets’ is less than ‎the explosive power of the smallest bomb Israel launched on Gaza in the last seven years. ‎

According to Wikipedia, the payload of the Qassam-1 is a half kilogram, for the Qassam 2 it is 5-7 kg and for the Qassam 3 it is 10kg.

Assuming an conservative average of 5 kg per rocket, multiplied by the 5000 Qassams that the editorialist admits about (the actual number os higher, plus mortars), we get 25,000 kg of explosives in Israel, or 25 metric tons.

If that is the smallest bomb in Israel's arsenal, that would be some arsenal!

Another ton of explosives found by Egypt

From Ma'an:

Egyptian security seized one ton of explosives from a hidden weapons cache in the Sinai Peninsula on Saturday, the Israeli intelligence services reported.

An Egyptian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that security forces discovered 13 packages of explosives buried in the desert that are suspected to be bound for the Gaza Strip.

Before the war, Egypt found these caches fairly regularly. Judging from what Israel found in Gaza, clearly Egypt only has found a fraction of the weapons and explosives that were going to Hamas.

As far as the documented finds go, this one is on the larger side.

It is also noteworthy that nearly every article about the Rafah tunnels written by the MSM in 2008 focused on consumer goods being smuggled and ignored the weapons and munitions, as the reporters fell into the Hamas propaganda trick of misdirection.